Isabel Fargo Cole grew up in New York, attended the University of Chicago, and has lived in Berlin as a freelance translator since 1995. Forthcoming translations include TWO PRAGUE STORIES by Rainer Maria Rilke (Vitalis-Verlag, Prague, Spring 2002), two excerpts from works by Wolfgang Hilbig and Thomas Lehr in the next issue of the Chicago Review. For those interested in the German “Inner Emigration,” her translation of an excerpt from DIARIES FROM THE SECOND WORLD WAR by Horst Lange, an associate of Ilse Molzahn, will appear in the 2002 issue of Two Lines, “Ghosts”. At present she is working on a translation of THE GOLEM, by Gustav Meyrink, for Vitalis-Verlag. Her translation of Christine Wolter, “The Rooms of Memory,” appeared in Archipelago, Vol. 4, No. 1, and of Annemarie Schwartzenbach, “Lyric Novella,” in Vol. 4, No. 4.

Corinna Hasofferett is a writer of Hebrew literary fiction and nonfiction and a recipient of the Yaddo and Ledig fellowships. Among her grants and awards are also the 1998/1999/2000 Fine Arts & Literature Grants from the Tel-Aviv Foundation, the Hebrew Writers Association Publication Prize, the Aricha Prize (for “Revelation”), the Institute for Translations of Hebrew Literature Translation Grants, the New Israel Fund Wyner Prize, the Institute for a Better Israel Award, the Israel Foreign Ministry travel grant to Egypt, the BCLA (British Comparative Literature Association) Publication Honor (for “Revelation”), the President of Israel Amos Grant and the recent Ministry of Culture Creativity Grant. In 1975 Corinna Hasofferet initiated and organized for a six-month term bi-weekly meetings and events in the Galilee featuring and attended by Palestinian and Jewish Israeli artists, composers and writers. In 1984, she founded HILAI, The Israeli Center for the Creative Arts. She directed the not-for-profit organization for eleven years, during which it ran two international artists’ and writers’ colonies in the Galilee and the Negev, and conducted more than five hundred peace-oriented encounters, and events and classes in art, literature, and music. Her work has been published in translation in such literary magazines and journals as Partisan Review, International Quarterly, Pen Israel Anthology, Jacket, The Richmond Review, Masthead, Patchword, The Alsop Review, et al. ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD has been translated into English; rights information can be obtained by email. In September 2002 she will be reading from ONCE SHE WAS A CHILD at the British Association of Slavic and Eastern European Studies, University of Surrey, U.K.

James L. Hicks began his career as a reporter for the Cleveland Call and Post in 1935 and later moved on to the Baltimore Afro-American. As one of the premier investigative journalists of his generation, Hicks was also the Washington, D.C. bureau chief for the National Negro Press Association, which served more than one hundred newspapers. In 1955, he became executive director of the New York Amsterdam News, a position he would hold for the good part of twenty years. As the first black member of the State Department Correspondents Association and the first black reporter cleared to cover the United Nations, Hicks was a pioneer in the field. His coverage of the Till trial ran in dozens of African-American newspapers, and in the piece of investigative journalism (reprinted in this issue) — which ran in four installments in October 1955 — he told about the role he played in discovering the existence of “missing witnesses” to the murder. In these articles — which ran in the Baltimore Afro-American, the Cleveland Call and Post and the Atlanta Daily World — Hicks argued that the forces of law in Mississippi conspired to prevent the full evidence of the guilt of Milam and Bryant, the known killers of Emmett Till, from surfacing at the trial. The four articles will appear in THE LYNCHING OF EMMETT TILL: A Documentary Narrative, by Christopher Metress (University of Virginia Press, September 2002).

Kevin McFadden, originally from the Cleveland area, received the M.F.A from the University of Virginia, where he began work on an anagrammatic sequence, “Danger Garden.” His poems have appeared in Poetry, American Letters & Commentary, Seneca Review, Ploughshares, and other literary journals.

Christopher Metress is Associate Professor of English at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. His essays and reviews on southern literature and culture have appeared in such journals as Southern Quarterly, Studies in the Novel, South Atlantic Review, and Southern Review. He is currently at work on a study of white southern writers and their responses to the civil rights movement. His THE LYNCHING OF EMMETT TILL: A Documentary Narrative, (University of Virginia Press) will be out in September 2002.

Ilse Molzahn was born in 1895 on her parents’ estate in Kowalewo, Posmania, in what is now Poland. In 1919 she married the expressionist painter Johannes Molzahn, with whom she had two sons. In the mid-twenties she began to publish stories and wrote feuilletons for various newspapers. The Nazi seizure of power had grave consequences for the Molzahns; in Breslau, where Johannes Molzahn had been teaching at the university, they were denounced and their house was searched, prompting them to move to Berlin. Johannes Molzahn’s paintings were included in the infamous Nazi exhibition of “Degenerate Art,” and in 1938 he emigrated to New York. Ilse Molzahn remained in Berlin, where she traveled in the circles of the “Inner Emigration” – intellectuals who, with varying degrees of openness, opposed the Nazi regime.

In 1936 Ilse Molzahn’s first novel, THE BLACK STORK, was published, only to be banned for “slander of the Junkers” and placed on the list of “harmful and undesirable literature.” However, under the Nazi regime she did publish two more successful novels, NYMPHS AND SHEPHERDS DANCE NO MORE (1938) and DAUGHTERS OF THE EARTH (1941), apolitical works which, with their superficial resemblance to the Nazi’s beloved “Blut und Boden” literature, escaped censorship. Both of Molzahn’s sons were killed in the Second World War. After the war she wrote mainly journalistic pieces for such newspapers as Die Zeit. SNOW LIES IN PARADISE, her last major prose work, was published in 1953. In 1972 THE BLACK STORK was rediscovered; a new edition appeared, and it was made into a television film. Interested American and English publishing houses are invited to contact the rights director of Langen Müller Herbig. In 1978 Ilse Molzahn was awarded the Andreas Gryphius Prize. She died in Berlin in 1981.

In 1939 Ilse Molzahn wrote the following self-description: “Born in Kowalewo, registered at the registry office in Margowin [...] as the ninety-ninth birth; it seems to be my fate never to quite make it to a hundred. My mother wept. The doctor was drunk, my father was slightly disappointed that it wasn’t a boy, for the toy horse already stood saddled by the cradle. Called Pony and Paninka, sometimes Kater [tom-cat -tr.], but tenderly named Katyushek by Pelagia, the cook, the first thing I learned was Prussian commands [...] Later, in school, asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I chose not to give the answer of my friend Janina, who wanted to be a betrothed, looked bashfully out of the window, outside which a light, bright cloud sailed past, and said ‘A writer!’ This provoked loud and unanimous laughter. Without ever being a betrothed, I married, carefully wished for a girl, it turned out to be a boy – and so forth. Once there was nothing more in particular for me to do, my kind husband gave me a typewriter. On it I learned ‘how to write’. But unfortunately not with all ten fingers.”

John Palcewski has been a photojournalist, music/drama critic, magazine editor, literary fiction writer, poet, and fine-arts photographer. His work has been published in the literary and academic press, as well as in major newspapers worldwide via United Press International. After New York, Philadelphia and a number of other large and small cities, he now lives in the villa of a vineyard on Isola d’ Ischia, the Bay of Naples, Italy. His fiction and photography can be viewed here.

Svetlana Vasilievna Vasilenko was born in 1956 in the closed military city Kapustin Iar, on the Volga. The city is attached to a cosmodrome built in 1946, and this rocket settlement, the first missile test site acknowledged by the Soviet, provided the setting for most of her stories. She graduated from the Literary Institute in Moscow. Her graduation project, the story “Hunting Saga” (also called “Going After Goat-Antelopes”), made her famous overnight and, critically, was named the best story of the year. Its publication coincided with Brezhnev’s death. Her subsequent stories were not published until seven years later, during which time she wrote intensively and compiled collections of women’s prose. Though her subsequent novellas and short stories have been translated into various languages, Vasilenko’s first sustained appearance in English is SHAMARA AND OTHER STORIES (tr. Andrew Bromfield, et al. Ed. and intro. Helena Goscilo. Northwestern University Press. 2000). Included is her only novel, LITTLE FOOL; nominated for the Booker Prize and recognized by the journal that published it as the best Russian novel of 1998. The novella SHAMARA chronicles a violent love triangle that unfolds in an atmosphere of rivalry, existential despair, and sexual ambiguity. Also included are the short stories “Piggy,” “The Gopher,” and “Poplar, Poplar’s Daughter,” as well as “Going after Goat-Antelopes.” The Ukranian director Natalia Andreichenko, made a film of SHAMARA, in 1995; it is available with English subtitles.

In 1993, in The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Nadezhda Azhgikhina wrote about the crisis in Russian high culture after Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet Union: “Not long ago the state of current writing was discussed at a roundtable in the literary department of the weekly Ogonyok. The journal staff tossed around theories and opinions about the latest stories and tales of the most interesting writers of the day: women like Svetlana Vasilenko, whose provincial protagonists find love amid the mud and slush of everyday life; Valeria Narbikova and her baroque eroticism; Tatyana Tolstaya, now writing her short stories from Princeton; Oleg Yermakov, who writes movingly about an innocent soldier trapped in the cruel Afghan war. And while we were discussing all this, we were bemoaning the current cultural crisis.

“Then somebody remembered that at the end of the last century, the critic Vissarion Belinsky wrote about a crisis in culture-and simultaneously praised the first works of Feodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Lermontov and wrote about Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. Writers of the Silver Age, the early twentieth century, also spoke about  ‘crisis’ and called their own period a time of ‘decadence.’ Crisis was a common theme of the 1920s. Hence all this talk in the lobbies of journal offices and within the walls of a university-a newly created one at that!-are testimonials to the eternal and tireless work of culture, which continues to develop despite political cataclysms and economic recessions.”

U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins and Scottish poet Carol Ann Duffy will co-judge the Davoren Hanna Poetry Competition, 2002. Sponsored by Eason Bookshops, Ireland’s largest chain of book stores, and The Muse Cafes, and named after the gifted young Dublin poet who died in 1994, the competition offers a first prize of $5000, and second and third prizes of $2000 and $1000 respectively, making it one of the largest such awards in Ireland and the U.K.

The competition is open to published and unpublished poets over the age of 18 writing in English. Entrants may submit as many poems as they wish. The closing date is 31st May 2002; winners will be announced in early August. Entry forms, rules and guide-lines are available for printing on Eason’s website, or by sending a stamped addressed envelope to Poetry Competition, The Muse Cafe, Eason Bookshop, O’Connell Street, Dublin 1, Ireland.

Nearly six years ago, David Castleman, under the nom de plume Gabriel Monteleone Neruda, offered us three tales, which we published in Archipelago, Vol. 1, No. 4. Recently, we were informed that one of these tales, “An Evening with Salvador Dali and Dylan Thomas,” also appeared (in the same year, and by “Gabriel Monteleone Neruda”) in River King Poetry Supplement. Shortly thereafter the editor of River King learned that Pudding Magazine: The International Journal of Applied Poetry had previously published the same “Neruda” story. Subsequently, the same editor saw “An Evening…”, now credited to David Castleman (who is also G. Monteleone N.), in Archipelago, as above, and in Mandrake Poetry Review. The news came as a surprise to (all of) us, and we at Archipelago are glad to acknowledge these other publications and their editorial acuteness. We urge our readers to read them regularly. We also sketch a salute the wily author, despite his bad form (he didn’t tell us about the other publications), which we hope won’t be repeated by others. We suppose he must be, like so many writers, generally dismayed by the publishing business and sure that all small magazines have different readers. Perhaps they do, but editors read everything. Eventually.